 Welcome. Thank you for being here. My name is Noah Warren. I'm the coordinator of lunch poms, and it's a real real treat for this last lunch poms of the academic year to welcome Brandon Shimoda Yeah, whoo Brandon's really really an original mind and artist Absolutely just an indelible voice. He's coming to us here from Colorado Springs I want to thank you For being here. I want to thank our sponsors which make this possible the library, of course the Dean's office the English department poets and writers and Pegasus books Who with via Patrick are selling Brandon's books today? So if you're tickled, please please buy a book before we get started if you would silence your cell phones I'm going to Jeffrey G O'Brien our director can't be here today So I'm going to read the introduction. He's prepared for Brandon and then Brandon will read I want to talk about Brandon Shimoda's most recent book Hydro Medusa, but Shimoda has designed his poetry such that borders between books unlike those in the world are open a 2019 memoir about his own US citizenship and his grandfather's traumatic struggle to live in the States May be called the grave on the wall an incredible phrase phrase for a photograph But there are several poems called the grave on the wall in his 2011 first collection Portuguese 2018 book of poetry is called the desert and there's either one or many poems called the desert in Hydro Medusa In fact the acknowledgements to this volume insist. It is a continuation of the desert rather than a fully distinct work This is no gimmick or facile form of interrelation But one sign of Shimoda's absolute commitment to the idea the faith that the things that have happened people forms of life atrocities even flowers are not over The grave can move to a wall or become a panoramic grave and the present world the world We think we love is scar tissue The dead in Shimoda's of like his titles and poems and collections Don't stop They become ancestors a key term for him whose descendants. We must learn over and over. We are In an essay in the nation about how the Japanese internment during World War two Functions as a blueprint for the present day incarceration of migrants Shimoda writes. I enter history through its graveyard Unsealing the grave of history is always part of what happens in a Shimoda poem, but in Hydro Medusa Poetry to is unsealed made to share space with essays Including one in on Japanese internment camps, which gives itself over Unable to be a single hermetic topic to the Narration of a murder of a Mexican teenager by a US Border Patrol agent The inclusion of this writing in and among the poems of the collection insists that poetry happens in this often Unfortunate world rather than in some privileged away space of inspired reflection and distillation and sanitization That essay called the descendant starts with a definition of the medieval notion of Cruantation a belief that a murdered corpse would spontaneously Rebleed in the presence of its murderer Shimoda's poetry may sometimes serve that function, but it is also full of the fecundity of ancestry Its desert is far from arid even if also a site of lost life and surveillance The hydra of myth spouts more heads when one is cut off Medusa's look makes stacks makes statues And this is a book full of proliferation and joyous witness alongside its necessary documentary directness His child Yumi appears and gives him the power to recast the world as only children can Such that he can say of her infant site of water her first water dark and fast wigs of silver Yumi's own words at two years old become poetry too and get their own page We're almost closer That's tree sap No, that's a pineapple clearing I hear sign of sirens I wanted a home I wanted and wanted and wanted a home Everything is here a joyful renaming of the matter of the world Alongside having one's own attention disrupted by sirens and the desire for shelter Which is a serial desire in a world of potential and actual dislocation and dispossession Shimoda is not a poet of joy or tragedy, but of joy in tragedy Tragedy during joy for the descendants who inherit this difficult world Please join me in welcoming him and his work. I was terrifying I forgot so that was Jeffrey Jeffrey's intro. Um, thank you so much. Noah and thank you Jeffrey wherever you are. I guess with child um I forgot who you were talking about About midway through that and then you and then you said my daughter's name and I was like, oh, that sounds familiar I think that's me Um Thanks so much everyone for being here Especially my sister and my niece are in the back Hi And I have various friends. Uh, it's really great to see everybody um It's really great to have view of evergreen trees out the window as I read I I haven't really timed my reading, but it's if I read Speedily enough although articulate enough it should take maybe 22 minutes. Is that appropriate? I don't know what happens after that, but I gave my reading a title Which I've never done before but for some reason I felt like I wanted to do that. It's called oranges and it's uh I just noticed putting this reading together that there were a bunch of oranges in it I had a dream last night that a rainbow was burning I had a dream last night That the war fit on the tip of a finger I had a dream last night that a scream Did not need a hill to gather speed to reach the people I had a dream last night that a shrine burned down and was replaced with a shrine identical, but empty Photographs of the dead grimacing from the walls And the aura of a tree in the shape of smoke Keeping keeping cool the dead a perfect instrument Innocence was emptiness The dead thrown into a milk tunnel Could only scratch a simple shrine in a prism A replica of a circumstance Not even the mountain in the sun of which the shrine was once a compliment seemed alive At the end of the tunnel an arch stood alone What it connected disappeared through the arch was a temple Yellow money exploding Shadows that mimicked great grandmother faces People sitting and watching life Pass into a jar Youths for example Eating ice cream I wanted ice cream too To sink into The arch the small battlement The colors on the temple roof The corresponding fears of old women and men With that memorial look Which accompanies then defines the form of ghosthood That haunts the possibility of peace Or the imploring of death The shrine I approached the altar Colorful with photographs of people I did not know Would never but now I had seen them As real to me as people I talked to but do not see Who are alive loved Deserved to be visited strangers go all over the rainbow Never settle Do not situate before the gaze of one particular stranger The dead were not gazing They wanted it to be over Their reflection to be stronger Like a lunar sound materializing a hymn of thanksgiving to the missing I had a dream last night that a man gave a performance in which he visibly aged When the performance began he was young By the end he was old The stage was large The space for the audience was small No seats The man walked to the foot of the stage and said in a low voice My house I had a dream last night By last night this uh this one I mean about five nights ago All the rest of them were last night I had a dream last night that I was visiting a neighborhood the size of a house Or was it a house the size of a neighborhood? It was the most natural place in the ever diminishing earth of this life I could see the sun inside the orange fruits On the thousand-year-old trees I could hear the sound inside the orange fruits Of people who survived were surviving the end of the earth of this life We're older now Free to sit like students again at tables made of tables that had once been broken for fire I went towards the sounds There was a doorway I stopped before the doorway above the doorway It was written in white paint It was the sign that said Rafat Alarir the poet was here It said Rafat Alarir the poet was here If this is a university then right over there He used to sit right over there At that table Is where he read roots Is where he read John Dunn Is where he read footnotes in Gaza Is where he read Othello I know a lady in Venice Would have walked barefoot to Palestine For a touch of his nether lip Amelia says Is where he read Alice in Wonderland Is where he read the autobiography of Malcolm X Three times at that table Is where he held his head Above the poem and his body Underneath the poem And the poem at the height of his heart Of his heart And watched the poem So closely Put the table back together Entire families could fit around it Entire generations Wrapping around the faces of their children Like a clock Tells time and feet Underneath the concrete Where a burnt moon Draws thousand-year-old Orange trees back into infancy To remember The ancestors sit on a hill And talk speachlessly with each other As they watch over the future Each family member gathers The pattern of resistance That will never relinquish their keys You could sit there At a distance, even, but Could you pick up Where the poet left off By imagining the poem growing again Soon enough Inside the body still underneath the city Chewed by one thousand Eight hundred, two thousand And five hundred, five hundred Pound bombs The way it used to be Standing Even though I could see In the dream The edge of the table I stood before the doorway And hesitating to walk Underneath the poet's name Looked up Free Palestine The poet was in the school Evacuate the school A voice from the sky said We are going to bomb the school The voice said from the sky We are going to eliminate The school, the voice said Go home So the poet went home To his brother To his sister To three of his sister's children So they bombed the home The poet fell into the home And through it Is where everyone lives In defiance of the whole That opens when the talents Of history are uprooted Like trees, orange Olive ancient eggs from the future And suddenly life Is transposed Is transparent With no life The training of no life Compulsory no life The personification Of U.S. manufactured chemicals And confessions And bombs like petrified Hearts beating With no life We're trying to stop his poetry We're trying to prevent his Next poetry In which the true voice Would sing plainly But the poet sang it already The words like Knots in a knife coming undone Because Except there was no next Because except for Conditioning the mind To be always on edge And always on time Rematerializing on the other side Of the intensification The fatal identification Of the poem now lives everywhere Excuse me Okay, this is part two That was part one Um This entire section Is based on, uh, is Nancy Okay here? So it's based on A story I think originally My friend Nancy who's in the back told me about Um, well I'll explain it But it's about this phenomenon That occurred in the sky above The Topaz concentration camp In April of 1943 I'm gonna read This first part is Pros and it's from a book That's coming out soonish from City Lights And it's about the afterlife Slash memory of Japanese American incarceration And that's gonna transition into a series Of poems that are about What the pros is Describing the poems you're also Gonna be talking about Hinotama One evening many years ago But not so many years ago A Japanese man Saw a rare and unusual flower On the far side of a barbed wire fence And leaning closer to look at the flower Was shot in the heart Rare and unusual flower That's from Julie Otsuka's When the emperor was divine In the days following the murder By a white military police Officer of James Hatsuaki Wakasa The prisoners in the Topaz concentration camp in Utah Japanese immigrants, Japanese Americans Saw in the sky Above where Wakasa died Hinotama Balls of light 81 years ago Next week April 1943 Kiyoshi Katsumoto Seven at the time Lived in the same block as Wakasa, block 36 On the corner of newly minted Cinnabar Avenue In Greasewood Way He and his friends were playing after dinner In the twilight, he told me When they saw an orange white ball Bouncing around at the sky What did it look like? I asked him It had jagged edges, he said Like flames? No, not like flames Was it translucent? No, it wasn't translucent Was it solid? No, it wasn't solid Was it windy? He said It was perfectly clear And to those who were not there Impossible to see clearly The Hinotama bounced for several minutes Then disappeared The following night, same thing An orange white ball with jagged Edges bouncing for several minutes Around the sky then disappearing More people saw it the third night Several minutes than silence Even more the fourth night Tamashi, the elders said Hinotama were attributed To premonitions of death The presence of ghosts The release of energy after someone died Sometimes a gas is produced When there is no space in which To contain something as voluminous As grief But Kiyoshi and his friends, happy At least momentarily Were not aware, not yet Of grieving Certainly not of contributing their share Of grief to the larger Orchestration Hinotama As anthropologist Marvin Oppler Thanks to Nancy Who introduced me to anthropologist Marvin Oppler notes Grew in time of community distress They were also reported In the Poston and Tule Lake camps And in the camps in Canada too The kids in school said That when old Honma-san Died in Bay Farm There was a ball of fire that came out of the house And then moved off up the mountain Writes Joy Kogawa In her novel Obasan The translation of an individual Life into a collective death Was on the edge of Topaz Immediate, the Japanese-Americans Saw in the Hinotama The violence inherent In what was being delivered To them as safety And were bound to one another In that illusion When Yoshi was talking I could see in his face The face of a boy Three quarters of a century younger It was not only the face of a boy Looking up at an orange-white ball But a face the orange-white ball Was looking at as it bounced Around the sky Bounced, that is With the faith And the affection of that face And I thought In that moment that maybe the Hinotama Was the 2,000-pound stone In the past That the Japanese-Americans Were looking at something like a star That had already burned out And with that They were time-traveling Hinotama The concentrated dawn Of the dead's afterlife A period, an appearance Which often requires the strength However silent and unassuming Of the living to be illuminated Hinotama The celestial manifestation Of the grief of the Japanese-Americans Poetry Hinotama There is a simpler, more pristine life Inside the ball of light Bouncing above the barbed wire fence A small incision made In space Through which an entirely new Fashion of human being Is spying on the people In carceries we are supposed to call them That is the signal of their expendability The striving of the human That makes the ball of light A planet fallen To a simpler, more pristine life Pressing the startled faces Together to describe The ephemeral achievement Of collective entrapment The loss that is constant And rapid Hinotama James Hatsuaki Wakasa Became upon death Emblematic of every person in camp And because the conditions And coordinates of his right to live Were defined by the white man In the tower outside of camp 2 When Japanese-Americans Talk about the murder of James Hatsuaki Wakasa And speculate why and what he was doing He was reaching through the fence To pick a flower He was walking his dog He was running after the dog The dog got caught in the fence He was collecting stones He was looking for fossils He was crawling under the fence to escape No he wasn't, he had no intention of escaping He knew as well as any of us That there's nowhere to go And so on They are trying to understand What they could and could not do They are trying to understand The exposition of their death When white people talk About the murder of the Japanese man They are not outlining The conditions of their freedom They are not imagining themselves In place of that man They are trying to understand Why people are murdered Not why they are the white man In the tower Hinotama The ball of light That bounced above the concentration camp Held in his patience The memory of the unusual flower The Japanese man was reaching for When he was shot He was born to breathe To breathe to give life To breathe to give life To friendship The Japanese man had sensitivity And must have thought In that desolation that he had been Struck by a heart The feeling of wind Watching over him Spring Okay I think this is part three So the The book on Japanese American Carceration that's coming out For a big part of it I interviewed Maybe 250 people Many of them in person Over Zoom And via questionnaire And one of the questions I asked So the people I interviewed Were all survivors And descendants of The prisons and camps And two of the questions I asked were Where do the ancestors Gather And where do you Where do you go to be with them So this next part is just People's responses to that question Where do the ancestors Gather and where do you go to Be with them In the morning Said Seshu Foster When I look in the mirror Said Satsuki Ina Said Emiiko Omori Always within me Said Ken Mochizuki Within myself Said Karli Iketali In myself and outside of myself Said Tiffany Koyama Lane Inside and outside of my mind Said Heather Nagami In my mind or heart Said Brittany Arita In the luminous center My heart said Mike Ishii In my blood Said Sarah Onitsuka In the air Said Chelsea Oda In the ether said Alden Hayashi In our earth Said Esther Honda Alone on a walk Said Jean Sakata Where there is nature and stillness Said Alyssa Kapaona Where there are stones and gardens Said Nancy Yukai In the garden said Mia Summers The ocean Said Darren Wakasa Meditation said Kei Itabe Through reasoning, questioning, looking for meaning Said Maggie Tokuta Hall Answers but more often ways into questions Said Aaron Aoyama Inward thinking Said Kyle Shoji Toyama In my thoughts Said Rick Noguchi In my thoughts and memories Said Nikki Nojima Lewis In our memories In my imagination said Marlene Shigekawa In spaces of ritual and remembrance Said Casey Hidekawa Layne Levinsky The resting places of their bones Said Koji Lao Ozawa During obon when I dance Said Ellen Bepp When I raise a picket sign Said Troy Osaki When I play taiko Said Karine Araki Kawaguchi In music, free improvisation Said Dylan Fujioka Every time I'm about to step on stage Said Nina Yoshida Nilsson Every time I sit down to write Said Ruth Sasaki Incorporating details of their lives into a story Said Cynthia Kadohata In my poems said W. Todd Koneko In historic photographs said Kevin Miyazaki In the frames of photographs and films Said Renee Tajima-Pena In the archives and within my queer speculative films Said Titi Takemoto In dreams said Madeleine Mori In the spiritual world said Patrick Shirayishi In the afterlife said Aaron Tsutsumoto If they sense we need their presence Said Duncan Ryuken Williams When I light green incense said Morgan Ome When I close my eyes at the sound of a deep round bell Said Sean Miura When I touch the beads And the candle goes out said Brian Kome Dempster I am with my ancestors said Masako Takahashi We visit and talk with them more often than when they were alive Said my father Dori Shimoda They try to talk to you but you don't understand Said Karen Ishizuka You listen anyway with all your might Through changes in light said Star Miata Whenever I take time to look at the moon said Donna Nagata I had a dream last night that I took my daughter To visit her great grandfather's grave When he got there his grave was gone And had been replaced with a white obelisk My daughter sat down in front of it And as if knowing exactly how to behave closed her eyes Inscribed on the obelisk were the words Hydra Medusa I had a dream last night that my grandmother On her deathbed Pulled me close to her face And said in a faint half broken voice Give away the one you want Thank you Brandon Rarely is precision more numinous That it is in a room with you or on your pages I think you give us elation And you offer us a kind of perpetual challenge Thank you That was a really moving reading Thank you all for being here Wow If you were challenged or elated by Brandon's reading His books are with Patrick back there And I highly encourage you to pick one up This is the last Lunch Poems reading of the academic year But if you're in a poetry groove now And part of my vision like Adrian vom Is in conversation with Kathy park Hong tonight And then reading tomorrow night both at 5pm I'm unsure if tickets are available But there is a live stream watch party in Mod 5 And Fadi Judah is going to be reading on mod 5 And Wheelar the next Monday On another note this is my last Lollipop reading as a coordinator five years, some of you I saw before the pandemic and then we weathered a couple years on Zoom. But thank you all for keeping this series as vibrant as it is. And as Camille here, Camille Constantine will be taking over as coordinator next year. So thank her and you're in good hands. Thank you all.